Before we continue on with our adventures in ancient Albia, I wanted to take a second here to appreciate the Tip of the Day feature.
The "Tip of the Day" is something I remember being fairly prominent in older programs or games, though my experience with programs and games from this era is pretty limited because I wasn't alive yet for most of it. Every time you opened the program (unless you unticked the "show tips on startup" box), you would be greeted with a random "tip" to help you with it.
Creatures 1's Tips of the Day are really charming. I know I keep using that word again and again when talking about this game, but it really is how I feel! This game is just so cute, and it feels like it's very reminiscent of the time in which it was released.
Here are a few other of my favorite Tips of the Day:
Norns "liking music" is something I had never really thought about. I'm pretty sure they don't actually have the ability to hear or conceptualize music, but it's really cute to think about. I have to wonder if people might have played music for their Norns after seeing this tip. I probably would have!
I found this one a bit poignant. After all, Creatures as a series encourages us to ask a lot of questions, and I like to think this "tip" was added in there to help get that ball rolling for some people.
What do we consider "alive"? At what point is something "alive" versus "not alive" - where do we draw that line? The creatures in Creatures have feelings, they have thoughts, they make their own decisions, they have "physical" (digital?) health that they must take care of, and they are born and die like any other living thing.
Our relationship with a creature's tiny life and death as humans that also live and die - and have now created things that also live and die, just like us - is really fascinating. I think that this was something Steve Grand was really hoping Creatures would make people think about. It certainly did that for me!
I don't have a lot to say about this particular "tip", but I thought it was an interesting tidbit that a lot of us might not have known about.
This last one was something that had me curious, as I'm not terribly familiar with Creatures 1 as a whole. Were there really paid add-ons for this game back in the day, or official new "locations" for creatures to go to? Or did those plans that were probably made when this tip was written end up falling through?
Now, then, back to our story...
After much begging and pleading with Darla and Benji to stay healthy and keep eating food, Benji finally became of breeding age - and immediately got Darla pregnant!
I was ecstatic, to say the least, that we were finally getting somewhere! Actually, Benji and Darla had been "fooling around" quite a bit this entire time - but he was still too young to breed, so nothing came of it.
Soon enough, Darla laid her egg without any difficulties. While she immediately booked it in the opposite direction, as if she'd decided she really didn't want anything to do with the whole thing, Benji was interested in it and spent a long while looking at it.
I was surprised to find that I was unable to pick up the egg at all. As it turns out, unlike the eggs from the Hatchery, eggs naturally laid by Norns can't be moved by the Hand. I guess that certainly makes things more interesting!
And sure enough, after waiting a good while longer, the baby was born! Just look at this cute picture. As luck would have it, the new baby is indeed a healthy young male, decreasing a little of the looming pressure from the lack of male eggs in the Hatchery.
Since my partner had been watching me play when he hatched, I asked her for a name for him, and she dubbed him Cornstarch. A unique name for a unique little guy!
While I spent most of Cornstarch's early minutes luring him back to the computer so that I could teach him his basic verbs, I did find out pretty quickly that learning language from other Norns is much stronger here than it is in the newer games. In fact, Cornstarch seemed to pick up certain words more quickly than he did when learning from the computer - in particular, he had already learned "look", "pull", and "norn" just from spending a minute or so around his parents!
I'm really happy about that, as it makes things a LOT easier for me - or at least, it'll help me avoid another "benji" incident...
At this point I was still admittedly having trouble getting my Norns to eat. Although they now know a slightly more proper word for food (..."eat"), it's still difficult to get them to eat regularly. It feels like they don't eat unless specifically commanded, which gets stressful when all of them have maxed-out hunger drives and keep just picking up and dropping food instead of eating it. It gets especially difficult when many Norns are around each other, and they're more occupied with each other than with eating, even with constant reminders...
Nonetheless, I managed to keep my Norns fairly healthy, and soon enough Darla laid another egg! I wonder what kind of creature we'll see next...
*Cornstarch!!* I love him!
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